Needs
by onwardheroine
Summary: "They had satisfied their needs with one another the way traders exchanged goods: matter-of-factly, but considerately, with an adequate amount of amiableness and a modicum of mistrust." Bruce/OC. One-shot. Self-consciously existentialist. Grown-up themes, etc.


**Disclaimer: **Not mine. Not making money. Duh.

Been awhile since I played here, but I feel like I still know everyone. Let me know if you think I'm too rusty. :)

* * *

**Needs**

Bruce ruminated the fantasy that Alfred had described: Master Wayne, without the caverns in his face, sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe; accompanied by some leggy European type with a bounty of curls and a sensual pout; perhaps also dandling an infant, coaxing it with sweets; and haloed by a light unique to summer days in Florence.

The still-life bemused him, not just because it seemed so foreign to be married with children, but because there_ had_ once been with a woman - in Paris, rather than Italy.

Bruce might not have thought to marry her, but he was a man, and he had needs. _And so had she_, he amended, in a nod to gender parity. They had satisfied their needs with one another the way traders exchanged goods: matter-of-factly, but considerately, with an adequate amount of amiableness and a modicum of mistrust.

Alfred's comment had compelled Bruce to remember her, in one of the moments that allowed for such things.

He remembered that they had met in late September. She had twenty-eight years to his thirty-odd. She was already a divorcée, with some money amassed by way of an ex-husband (older). She claimed also to earn an income writing freelance, which allowed her to live where and as she pleased. She informed him that her mother was English; her father, French.

She spoke like a writer, or, at any rate, like a person who had invested time in her opinions. Bruce gathered this about her right away, likely due to the circumstances of their meeting. It was a soiree to which another Gothamite, who had a summer place in _Le Marais_, had invited him, after a chance encounter in the bar at _L'Hôtel_. Given the trendy locale, it made sense that the party's guest list comprised of actors, artists, writers and the rich people whom they entertained.

Even in Paris, Bruce found himself preferring his own company. Though he had felt obligated to accept his peer's invitation, he did not avail himself of the occasion. Instead, he arrived early, made one circuit of the room, and planted himself on a balcony, in shadow, with a Manhattan in hand. While observing the twinkling city, he sipped his drink the way a tide erodes a shoreline, dragging the land away over a period of years. Meanwhile, the ice melted into the amber liquid. The glass became slick with condensation. A crisp breeze moved over him, tugging at his clothes, his hair.

Bruce's moment ended when a couple burst onto the balcony, arguing.

The woman spat French like an automatic weapon.

_Ne me dis pas ce que faire les femmes. Je suis femme! J'en connais plus que toi. Et je crois que la biologie est indéniable. Malgré les -_

The man cut her off.

_La biologie? Alors, vous préférez se soumettre au mari?_

At this, the woman stamped her foot.

_Idiot! Ce n'est pas une question d'institution. C'est une question du désir - quand on homme désire une femme, c'est réflexe. C'est également réflexe, pour une femme, profiter du désir d'un homme… Les hommes avaient toujours tous les ressources et tout la puissance. Les femmes utilisent leurs seuls actifs naturels en prisant leur moyen. C'est cliché, mais c'est _instinctif_, malgré ce que dire les féministes. Ça va? _

The man appeared to ponder this. If Bruce followed right, the woman was arguing something about instinct and desire… men and women… women using their wiles to take power. She had been talking pretty fast, and his French was rusty.

The man looked about to speak. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked off to the side, nonplussed.

_Ça c'est l'argument d'une prostituée._

Bruce, who felt involved in the conversation despite himself, raised his eyebrows. He had to look over to see how the woman reacted to this remark. At first, it looked as if she might throw her expensive little evening bag at her companion. Then she sighed, tossing her hands.

_Eh bien, peut-être oui… En tout cas, tu me barbes._

She crossed her arms and turned away, effectively ending the discussion. For a second, her companion looked lost. Bruce could imagine that he had started whatever conversation they were having as an attempt to woo the lady, to apparent failure. Now he seemed reluctant to concede, but the lady in question offered no alternative.

The man visibly rolled his eyes and turned away. He caught sight of Bruce in the shadows and paused, but the latter held up his free hand with palm facing outward, as if to indicate that he had no opinion - and no judgments. The original man made a disgruntled noise and rejoined the party.

It required considerable _sang-froid _not to laugh.

Since it appeared that the woman was ignorant to his presence, Bruce took time to examine her.

Her dress was daring. Some might have called it vulgar. The emerald satin clung to her torso but relaxed below the hips, giving leeway to the wind to tug at the fabric. The front of the dress was a halter style, and the back plunged all the way to her waist, leaving bare a field of luminescent skin, softly cloven by the line of her spine, and punctuated, like an exclamation point, by a dimple in the flesh at the base.

With her brown hair pulled up and braided into a complicated something-or-other, her neck was also exposed, a fact to which she seemed to call deliberate attention with a pair of dangling earrings. More reflexively than out of active interest, Bruce wondered what it would be like to brush his fingers over that skin… whether it was soft, whether warm or cool, whether or where it had scars and imperfections.

Still quiet and unmoving, he watched her pop open the clutch that she carried and extract a lighter and a silver cigarette case. She struggled with the lighter until Bruce chose to step out of the darkness.

"Allow me."

She didn't jump. She turned and appraised him coolly. Rather than let him pry the lighter from her, she held it out to him, waiting. He set his drink down on the stone railing (_clink_) and lit the cigarette she held in her mouth. As she inhaled, she took the lighter back from him.

She expelled a stream of blue smoke over the city.

"_Merci_." She gave him another once-over, with a pucker to her mouth that suggested she found something amusing.

"You're Andrew's mystery guest," she guessed, in impeccable English. "The eccentric, wealthy one. Wayne."

Her accent made her sound as if she were always about to laugh. Or perhaps it was the little smirk with which she said everything.

"Yes."

"Why are you in Paris?"

Bruce did not allow his expression to change, although thinking about the reason why he had left Gotham, even a couple years out, would still have been sufficient to make him cringe.

"Pleasure," he said, as an alternative to 'Business.'

"That makes you like the rest of us," said she. The way she narrowed her eyes at him was more mischievous than maleficent - or it was a mix of the two, like a Cheshire cat. "I am Anita - Sauvage."

She offered her hand to shake. It took Bruce a moment to realize that Sauvage was her name, and not an insult directed at him. He took her hand, but then he shifted his grip so that he had a hold on her fingers instead. He lifted them lightly to his lips and looked up at her in the first playful gesture that he had made toward anyone in ages.

"How do you do?"

* * *

The sex was good in the way a BLT is good: uncomplicated, yet satisfying; earthy, and worth savoring. She did not taste like cigarettes, although Bruce might have expected it. Instead, she tasted like the champagne that their host had been serving a few hours before, at the party, and like the cherry bonbons of which she had bought a box on the walk to her flat. (_But you _have _to try them, cheri!_)

She was positively elfin. When she kicked out of her high heels, the train of her gown pooled on the floor at her feet, and the top of her head _almost _came to Bruce's shoulder. For the first time, he noticed that her eyes were not brown, as he had thought, but had grey and green mixed in.

She left her hair in its intricate design. She untied the straps of her dress and let the fabric slide off of her like liquid. Unabashed, she slipped out of her black undies and kicked both them and the dress away. She wore no bra. She stood before him, her pink little breasts awakening to the cool air. He noted how her body was slight, but that it still curved in the important places, how the plane of her belly stayed flat and smooth below her sternum but then sloped off gently where the line of her pubic hair began. He knelt and followed the shape of her stomach with his lips until he reached the juncture of her thighs, at which point she sighed and laced her fingers into his hair.

* * *

"I have a wicked reputation, you know," she warned him. She sat in the window seat, wrapped in an afghan. With the sash lifted, she held one hand into the night; from the fingers of this hand dangled another cigarette, burning delicately. "I date men for their money."

"I didn't realize we were formally dating."

Anita smirked.

"I only bring it up because I want to clarify that your money doesn't interest me. Tonight I just want to shag."

"Did I satisfy?"

"In principle."

Bruce laughed quietly. He was still in bed, with a white linen sheet to protect his modesty. He was helping his hostess dispose of the remainders of a Pinot Noir that she had bought for a dinner party earlier in the week.

Now that the instinctive animal desire had ebbed, he had had time to investigate her flat. It had two full rooms, something of a luxury in Paris. It might have been 500 feet square, all hardwood floor and exposed beams. There was a tidy little kitchen with stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and a decorative bunch of fruit on the bar, in a bowl that looked as if it might have been Moroccan. In the same room as the kitchen, she had a seating area with IKEA sofas and a flat-screen television. The bedroom was smaller. It contained a chest of drawers, also Swedish in origin, with a mirror on top for applying make-up. The bed was the most luxurious item of furniture in the apartment, a four-poster with a deep mattress, nearly too big to fit into the bedroom. It was the sort of bed in which Bruce imagined that it might be easy to spend a whole day.

He felt he couldn't leave her remark unattended.

"That isn't a charitable answer," he said.

"It depends on how you choose to interpret it."

"I'm not sure how to interpret it."

She squinted at him.

"You've never just elected to understand reality as you saw fit?"

"I've gotten in trouble for making assumptions about people's intentions."

Anita shrugged, stubbing out her cigarette.

"We all have," she allowed. "In any case, you're missing the point. Look at the context: I am a strange woman who brought you to her bed a few hours after meeting you. You'll leave my bed in the morning, and it is likely that neither of us will see the other again. It would be this way regardless. Does it matter if you satisfied me or not? You could make it a matter of ego, I suppose, but even then the answer to your question would be a concept that existed in your head. You could choose to imagine yourself as Casanova and leave here with a healthy self-respect, or you could lament your skills as a lover and leave with crippled self-esteem. You make it whatever you want. If you're brave enough, you can apply the same reasoning to any other emotion that you experience, even the ones that feel imperative. You _choose _to experience your emotions. Don't you agree?"

Bruce frowned, remembering her argument with the hapless suitor.

"Isn't that different than what you said to the guy before?" he asked. "About biology."

At first, Anita looked puzzled. Then she gave a soft purr of laughter.

"Oh, Antoine," she said, remembering the party. "That's fair. Desire is a unique kind of emotion. I'm talking about sadness, anger, pride. Desire is like need. It's instinctive. You must either satisfy it or deny it. You can choose to ascribe emotional value to it or not."

"I get what you're saying in theory," Bruce said, more to his wine glass than to her, "but some emotions _are_ instinctive… Elephants feel grief."

It was the only example he could call to mind, but it appertained. Anita considered his rebuttal.

"Elephants," she murmured. "_Bon, _perhaps grief is instinctive for them. They don't have the reasoning abilities that humans do to control how they interpret the death of a loved one."

While Bruce was prepared and even expected to deal with callousness when it came to privileged individuals, this particular expression cut him to the bone. Memories blossomed like fireworks in his mind, brief flashes, dying quickly: Rachel in an evening gown, touching his cheek as she leaned in to kiss; his mother, dressing for the opera, pausing to bring him into her arms, fragrant and warm in the way that only mothers can be; his father, folding down the morning paper to answer a question from his son.

"I'm sorry, Bruce. Have you lost someone?"

Anita's voice was softer now. Bruce coughed, shaken from his reverie.

"I don't want to talk about it."

She regarded him with an expression that would have required a cipher to interpret.

"Then let's not," she said. Taking the blanket around her shoulders, she unfolded from the window seat, crossed the room and took the wineglass from his hand. After she drained the rest of its contents, she set it on the bedside table. She allowed the blanket to slip from her shoulders, leaving her bare, and then she slid into bed beside him.

Bruce recoiled.

"I can't do that now."

"I'm not asking you to fuck," said Anita. She laid a hand on his shoulder. "Turn over. I'm going to rub your back."

Since she phrased it as an order, he hardly felt able to resist. He rolled over, and she climbed atop him, sitting astride his hips. He grunted as she plunged her thumbs into the triangles of flesh where his shoulders connected with his neck.

"You have incredible tension in your shoulders, my friend." She paused, and he could feel her fingertip trace one of his scars. "You have had a hard life."

She made this observation in the manner of a scientist, curious but unassuming, without a trace of pity in her voice. Bruce chose not to respond.

Anita moved her hands over his flesh as if she were molding clay, at times using long, deep strokes; at others, short, circular waves. It felt as if she were trying to reshape his body.

As the massage continued, Bruce felt something inside him, like a flower unfurling: pain, but not of the physical kind. This pain felt profound and unrelenting. At one point, she was working out a knot in his left flank, kneading and rolling it under her fingers. As the knot unlocked itself, Bruce felt his eyes sting. These were not tears from the physical discomfort, which he could more than withstand. Instead, they seemed to come nowhere. Maybe from relief, from anxiety… or anger… or sadness, or some mix of feelings, none of which really had an origin. It took effort not to wail like a child. Instead, he allowed himself one hoarse vocalization: "Ah!"

Anita laid her hand over the tender spot as he shuddered.

"_Ça va, cheri_?"

Bruce struggled to articulate what he had felt. He remained silent, seeking words, until, perhaps assuming that he would not talk, she went on.

"Sometimes the body stores emotional stress in the form of physical tension," she explained. Then she paused, perhaps debating whether to say what she did next. "Something terrible must have happened to you, darling. May I ask what it is?"

Bruce closed his eyes. In the span of seconds, he saw many terrible things, some of which had happened to him. He heard a distant echo of dark laughter. Still, he found himself unable to speak, except to croak something that sounded like "I can't."

Anita took a deep breath. All in one motion, she exhaled and slid forward so that she was lying on top of him. He felt the soft flesh of her breasts against his back. She was cold from sitting by the window. She snaked her arms around his chest and laid her cheek against him.

"It's all right," she said. "I don't need to know… But I feel as if I should tell you that I have dark things, too, that I kept inside myself for a long time. The truth is: you can't hide from the past. You quite literally carry it with you at all times."

Although he understood that her words came from a place of sympathy, Bruce rankled at the implication that he had not realized this already.

"I know," he said, more sullenly than he meant to.

"Do you?" Anita replied. She turned so that her lips brushed his neck. "Just because you know you have dark things doesn't mean you're not still hiding from them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be buried inside you."

Bruce didn't respond right away. As the anxiety abated, he awakened to the fact that her back rub had the intended effect: he felt as if he could melt right into the mattress.

"You're incredibly forward," he mumbled, because he didn't want to give her the satisfaction of winning an argument.

Anita laughed outright, and he could feel the vibration in his body.

"So I've been told," she said, rolling off of him. She curled up on the other side of the bed, facing away from him. "I don't know what your past is, baby, and it's none of my business, but you can't pretend it's not still there."

* * *

It had not been his intent, but he slept over. The bed, with its down mattress, high thread-counts and oversized pillows, was too tempting - particularly after she had left his body the consistency of polenta.

She seemed different in the morning, more grounded, though no less graceful. She awoke before he did and took a shower. Bruce laid in bed and watched with one eye open, otherwise pretending to be asleep, as she emerged from the bathroom, hair still dripping. She had unbound it at last, and it spilled over her shoulders in a flood of dark curls. She stood at the vanity, wrapped in white terrycloth, and applied her make-up: eyeshadow, for a smokey effect, mascara, and a dark, wine-colored gloss for the lips. Deftly, she knitted her hair into a French braid. Her skin gleamed like white stone under the light pouring in at the window. She seemed like a vampire to him, cold and lovely.

Not to dispense with pleasantries, they shared croissants and coffee at a cafe on the corner. They sat at an iron-lace table, she in giant sunglasses, a black sweater and ballet flats; he in slacks and a white button-down shirt that wanted to pretend as if it hadn't been out all night. The morning was brisk in the way of early fall mornings, with the promise of heat later on in the day. The sky was almost a dark blue.

After the check came, Bruce lingered. While he could sense that his companion wanted a smoke break, he felt compelled to ask: "What was your dark thing?"

Anita's gaze was unreadable behind the dark glasses, but her mouth tightened a little.

"When I was eleven, and my sister was sixteen, my stepfather beat and raped her, and I saw it happen," she said. "He threatened to kill me if I tried to tell anyone."

"What did you do?"

"Obviously, I told my father. He was a lawyer. He said he would take care of it." Anita looked away. "My father was a good man. I told him one night when he had me and my baby brother for the weekend, and my sister was away at school. He said he would take the matter to the police the very first thing in the morning."

"And?"

Here, Anita hesitated. Even though he couldn't see her eyes, Bruce noticed a change in the way she held herself that betrayed her anxiety: she wrapped her arms around herself, her shoulders slumped, and she seemed incapable of looking directly at him.

"_And…_ the man was murdered before my father could speak to the police," she said. "Coming home that night from a pub, my stepfather was mugged. His assailant beat him so thoroughly that they had to identify him using his fingerprints. The man who killed him was never found, nor any trace of him, which always seemed to me a little strange, since most crimes of passion tend to be sloppy." She breathed in unsteadily. "I guess it hardly matters. He earned his fate."

Bruce appraised her, taking in this new information.

"It seems unlike you to believe in fate," he murmured.

"Well, you don't know me." And her supercilious smirk returned. "But mine is also a belief in a tested natural principle, Bruce: that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Bruce's eyebrows twitched.

"What goes around comes around," he said.

"Exactly."

_Why did this conversation feel familiar_?

He brushed the thought away. Grabbing his jacket from the night before, which he'd draped over the back of his chair, he stood up.

"I should probably leave you to your morning. You probably have another rich boyfriend to catch up with."

Anita grimaced.

"Obviously," she said, and she also stood. Before he could protest, she stepped forward, lifted her chin and placed a soft kiss on the side of his mouth.

When she pulled away, she stood still for a moment, her hand resting on his shoulder. She said: "When you're in Paris again, you must come and see me."

He inclined his head, enjoying the fragrance of her hair.

"If I'm in Paris again, I'll try."

Then, rather than allow her to be the first to walk away, he turned and made his way up the street.


End file.
